Biography

Yuval obtained his BSc in Biology in 1997 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He loved the botanical-garden-like campus in Givat Ram, so he stayed there for his MSc and PhD. His master’s thesis dealt with Iris morphological taxonomy, while in his doctorate thesis he studied the pollination ecology of the Oncocyclus irises. He received his PhD in 2004. During a postdoc at Indiana University (USA) he carried out research on the ecological genetics of hybrid sunflower species, Helianthus anomalus, and on the pollination ecology of recombinant inbred lines of the cultivated and wild common sunflower. Yuval Joined Tel Aviv University as a Porter research fellow in School for Environmental Studies in 2008. He appointed as a director of the Tel Aviv University Botanical Garden in 2009 and joined the Dept. of Plant Sciences as a faculty member in 2012. His current research interests include the evolution of plants under climate changes, ecological speciation of Oncocyclus irises, and the effect of pollinators' behavior on the evolution of flowers.

Research Interests

The research in Sapir's lab focuses primarily on understanding how ecology shapes plants' evolution, how plants adapt to their environment, both biotic and a-biotic, and how species diversity is formed and maintained. Especially we are interested in a few specific questions:

(1) Do pollinators act as natural selection agents on flowers? What is their relative power in shaping floral traits, and to what extent other factors (like a-biotic conditions or herbivores) affect it?

(2) What is the genetic basis of traits affecting floral traits that attract pollinators? Does plant's genetic variation affect pollinators’ behavior? Is there genotypic selection on structural genes through their expression?

(3) Does ecology play a role in speciation? To what extent ecological adaptation affect reproductive isolation between populations within a species and provides the first steps towards creation of a new species?

(4) Can plant adaption be rapid enough to track the pace of current climate changes? Is rapid evolution plausible in the face of human-made disturbances? Are there plant populations more (pre-)adapted to upcoming desertification?

Sapir, Y. and R. Mazzucco. (2012) Post-zygotic reproductive isolation among populations of Iris atropurpurea: the effect of spatial distance among crosses and the role of inbreeding and outbreeding depression in determining niche width. Evolutionary Ecology Research 14: 425–445. (PDF)